I think one of the reasons I was distressed by recent photos of myself is that the photos made it clear how silly I’m being with some of my little potions and rituals. Here I am, using a nice anti-aging face cleanser, and then carefully applying toner, and then the anti-aging daily moisturizer—and making sure with each product to put the extra onto the backs of my hands. Using a special acid formula once a week before bed. Making all these tiny, possibly imaginary differences, that from three feet away are utterly invisible, if they even exist at all. No one is going to even be able to TELL if my eye wrinkles have decreased by 5%. Meanwhile here I am fussing away, spending both the time and the money.
Well. I have soothed myself by realizing that Everyone Already Knows What I Look Like. These photos are surprising to ME, but not to ANYONE ELSE. Because EVERYONE ELSE can already SEE ME—and from more angles than I’d want to explore. To them I look absolutely normal and Like Myself, just as they all look absolutely normal and Exactly Like Themselves to me. Their dear faces and forms! I would not notice if their wrinkles or stomachs had decreased by 5%, nor would I care!
Noticing how we’re all aging during the menopause transition has caused me to notice What’s Next for us: it doesn’t stop at the wider tummy and the greying frizzing hair. My sister-in-law and I were discussing how we’ve both recently even found ourselves doing some distressing Age Math. Like: how many more years can we reasonably expect to live, even if all goes extremely well—that kind of math. And I wonder what we will lose on the way! Teeth, mobility, sight, hearing, breathing, THINKING. People who live to the “if all goes extremely well” point are not typically still living with all their original functions. I have also been having those sudden “I am actually going to die, and the only question is HOW WILL IT GO DOWN” thoughts. Not like I didn’t have them before, but now they feel realer/nearer. Several of my former friends/classmates have already died. I feel like we’re gradually filling in a dark little spreadsheet: this one got pneumonia and the hospital couldn’t stop it; this one had a heart attack; this one, cancer. There’s my little empty spreadsheet cell, waiting.
I WONDER IF WE COULD FIND A MORE CHEERFUL TOPIC. Oh, hey, have you bought any U.S. presidential election MERCH yet? I wanted to buy an official (i.e., sold by the campaign) t-shirt, but found all the choices boring—and almost entirely men’s cut, even the cat-lady ones. Inspired by local friends who are at this point curating little COLLECTIONS of campaign t-shirts, I finally chose this one as my first:
(image from Amazon.com)
It has the happy, cheerful vibe I was looking for. It looks black in the photo, but I ordered it in navy. (If you click through, it’ll revert to the men’s cut and the black color, which I find annoying.) I found one I liked even better, with daisies, but it said KAMALA/WALZ and I don’t like the mismatch. I don’t mind using first names, but we are not going to use first names for woman and surnames for men, not on my t-shirt.
An amusing number of the shirts on Amazon say Harris/Waltz. The one I bought has Walz on the shirt, but the listing title says Waltz: I was very alarmed when I got my purchase confirmation!
Also, I have filled out my calendar with the election countdown. I don’t want to be thinking about it constantly, but I do want to easily know how many days are left. I put a tiny number in the top corner of each day. Sixty-six days left, if I didn’t mess up the numbers. (Do say so if I’ve messed up the numbers.)
I finally purchased my first shirt so I could get the friendship bracelet logo: https://www.social-goods.com/collections/swifties-for-kamala-x-social-goods
It looks mens cut but I almost don’t even care. I got some stickers too!
Oh that’s really cute. Thanks for sharing!
Wow, that got to a dark place. I will say that I tend to be pretty blithe about this, as if I’m going to live forever and in perfect health. What’s that, you say? It’s not possible? Lalalalalala I can’t hear you.
Gosh I hope I didn’t just smite myself.
The Everyone Knows idea is soothing and also not? Like, “omg everyone already knows about that chin hair?” Although that’s a bad example because our eyesight isn’t what it once was, is it? It’s true, I just see my much-loved friends and I don’t ever notice any changes in their faces or bodies, they just always look wonderful to me. I hope that the reverse is true for them!
I suspect the chin hair is the flip-side of “no one can see that I reduced neck-crepeyness by 5%”: no one can see the chin hair, either. Well, if it’s a THICKET of chin hairs, they probably can. But one lone hair, even TWO? Fall into the category of No One Can Tell, rather than Everyone Already Knows.
I have similar dark thoughts and I comfort myself by thinking that I’m a different person than I was 20-30 years ago and I will probably be a different person in another 20-30 years. Maybe that version of me won’t be so tethered to this world and will be more like, “meh, I’ve had my share of it”.
66 days! Oh boy. I haven’t bought merch yet but I’m seeing a lot of Harris/ Walz signs around my neighborhood and it makes me happy to see them.
“Oh their dear faces and forms!” is my new mantra. So lovely.
The empty spreadsheet cell — shudder. True and horrifying and sad.
I don’t know if you ever read Watership Down, but it’s a book I think about sometimes I get older, with the way the rabbits deal but also don’t really deal with the omnipresent death all around them. But I also think that is maybe an especially since-COVID thing (If I remember right, Watership Down is one of the many many classic books we have that is some guy trying to write out the trauma of living through WWII), and so maybe there is hope for it to be a little bit less like this as time goes on.
So I have a weird in between place on the dying age. Most of my relatives have lived quite long. Three of my four grandparents lived to be in their nineties and that was back a while ago. (They were in their nineties when I was in my early twenties.) My more distant relatives have done the same. We’ve reached 99 and regularly. However, it seems like about 1/4 of us go out early. Like my dad died at 66, my grandmother in her early sixties? (I’m not too sure, I was in second grade when she died.) So either I have twenty years left or fifty? Or maybe I’ll build on what my previous ancestors did and live to be 120 in this age of modern healthcare? There’s no way to know!
I chose a MYODB shirt for my first 2024 campaign shirt. There were so many I wanted to buy with various levels of “in your face”-ness. but this seemed like a gentle yet pointed message. The Y is a uterus and the O was a ring of pearls with sneakers :)
I bought a Joyful Warrior shirt from our local t-shirt shop (https://www.raygunsite.com). Not specifically Harris/Walz, but the shirt was pretty and a good first shirt. I’m still thinking about my next one.
I find myself getting annoyed sometimes trying to decide how much, exactly, I should be dwelling on the fact of my death. Western culture with our deification of youth and hysterical fear of death is bad, I guess, but it doesn’t seem terribly useful to sit around contemplating my mortality every minute of every day. So what precisely should the breakdown be? I have quite a few bodily complaints, to which I direct some ameliorating efforts, but I think I’m a little afraid of throwing everything at it and finding out that nothing actually works. It’s not quite life-limiting yet, though.
I’m Canadian, so I haven’t gotten any merch, but given the dismal prospects awaiting us for our next election (horrifying Conservative prospect, annoying Liberal prospect who shows no signs of doing the Biden-esque Better Thing, and even if he did there’s no obvious Kamala Harris equivalent. Sigh) maybe I should.
I bought this one – Comma La
https://a.co/d/5583ic1
I wanted something that reflected my rage but decided that these might make me the victim of violence in my very red state.
https://i.etsystatic.com/19139693/r/il/fffbf9/6221353783/il_794xN.6221353783_7pyx.jpg
https://ultras.com/trump-prisoner-p01135809-adult-tri-blend-t-shirt-ult-290920/
Vote Removes Stubborn Orange Stains Funny Anti-Trump T-Shirt
You Can’t Fix Stupid But The Hats Sure Make It Easy Identify T-Shirt
Great t-shirt design!
“I don’t mind using first names, but we are not going to use first names for woman and surnames for men, not on my t-shirt.” Thank you for this. Drives me nuts to hear people say “Kamala” and then [Last Name of Former President].
A friend made me a shirt that just says “Harris for President 2024” and another one that says “my favorite season is the fall of the patriarchy”.
I bought this shirt from Etsy because I feel like I need to be representing 24/7, but can’t always do so. I’ve even worn it to work!
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1774326879/subtle-harris-walz-shirt-kamala-harris?click_key=a191cb490d14c4f891a28e9288273d1a8732e8c4%3A1774326879&click_sum=53b73715&ref=shop_home_recs_1&pro=1&sts=1
I’m in a deep red state so I went with this: https://www.etsy.com/listing/847751649/alabama-blue-dot-red-state-funny . And I love it so much!